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> under democratic oversight within a lawfully elected representative government The writer assumes that western / US-affiliated elections are universally, law

> under democratic oversight within a lawfully elected representative government The writer assumes that western / US-affiliated elections are universally, lawfully elected, and never the product of illegalities... while writing about likely-illegal operations by some of the very same people within those very same governments.

stephen_g 6y ago
Yeah, hard to trust that they’re actually following the law. Here in Australia, the chief law officer (Attorney General Christian Porter, who incidentally is on leave because just recently it came out that he allegedly violently raped a minor 30 years ago) has failed to produce the reports on the use of various surveillance powers as required of him by our National Security Information Act for the last three years... And nothing will happen on that, because his own department would have to prosecute him! The Government is generally in trouble, because they all covered up a staffer being raped by another staffer in the office of the Minister of Defence (literally in her office), as well as a bunch of other scandals. She was apparently pressured not to report it to police for fear of losing her job. Again, no public body that will actually prosecute anybody over that, hopefully the outrage will be enough for somebody to resign and things will change next election... At the same time, they keep ramming through laws that increase surveillance power while removing judicial oversight and requirements for warrants. Out intelligence agencies are also severely under-supervised, because while we do have a small agency of bureaucrats to supervise them, the Senate committee made up of actually elected people (the Parliamentary Joint Committee On Intelligence and Security) can’t actually review any past, current or planned operations, they can only look at the legal frameworks (and we just have to hope the intelligences agencies are following the law, and the IGIS actually does their job...)

stephen_g 6y ago

Yeah, hard to trust that they’re actually following the law. Here in Australia, the chief law officer (Attorney General Christian Porter, who incidentally is on leave because just recently it came out that he allegedly violently raped a minor 30 years ago) has failed to produce the reports on the use of various surveillance powers as required of him by our National Security Information Act for the last three years... And nothing will happen on that, because his own department would have to prosecute him! The Government is generally in trouble, because they all covered up a staffer being raped by another staffer in the office of the Minister of Defence (literally in her office), as well as a bunch of other scandals. She was apparently pressured not to report it to police for fear of losing her job. Again, no public body that will actually prosecute anybody over that, hopefully the outrage will be enough for somebody to resign and things will change next election... At the same time, they keep ramming through laws that increase surveillance power while removing judicial oversight and requirements for warrants. Out intelligence agencies are also severely under-supervised, because while we do have a small agency of bureaucrats to supervise them, the Senate committee made up of actually elected people (the Parliamentary Joint Committee On Intelligence and Security) can’t actually review any past, current or planned operations, they can only look at the legal frameworks (and we just have to hope the intelligences agencies are following the law, and the IGIS actually does their job...)